Evaluating the role of biochar in mitigating the inhibition of polyethylene nanoplastics on anaerobic granular sludge

The extensive application of anaerobic granular sludge (AGS) to wastewater treatment for methane recovery has drawn considerable attention to the system performances affected by the presence of emerging contaminants in wastewater such as nanoplastics. However, effective strategies on how to mitigate the inhibition caused by nanoplastics remained unavailable. In this study, a novel strategy using biochar to mitigate the inhibition on the AGS performances caused by polyethylene nanoplastics (PE-NPs) was proposed and the corresponding mitigating mechanisms involved were explored. The PE-NPs solely decreased the level of methane recovery of AGS to 71.3 ± 2.7% of control, which was subsequently increased to 85.6 ± 0.8% of control with the presences of both biochar and PE-NPs, although biochar solely showed no obvious effect on methane production. The addition of biochar also elevated the granule size of AGS, along with AGS integrity based on the morphological observation. Moreover, the distributions of live cells and functional microbes related to acidification and methanation increased with biochar addition compared to sole PE-NPs exposure. More extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) was secreted when biochar was involved in AGS systems, with more protein being detected to maintain the granule structure of AGS. Evaluation of adsorption tests indicated that biochar possessed stronger affinity for PE-NPs than AGS, thus capturing the PE-NPs that would originally contact AGS and posing less toxicity to microorganisms.